– Yahoo
implements digg-style voting across some of its products; two opposing
headlines pretty much sum this story up… Yahoo Anecdotal’s headline: It
takes two to Tango (suggesting interaction between Y! developers and their
users); digg’s headline: Yahoo
Shamelessly Rips Off Digg and Brags About It. The first digg commenter on
the story wittily…
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
Understanding your audience
is the key to success in any business – including blogging. Lately the Read/WriteWeb
authors have been discussing what it is that keeps readers coming back here. Our recent poll
indicated that most of you come back to this blog for Analysis and
Reviews. We are…
While YouTube and online
video is all the rage currently, I often wonder if there’s anything on these video
websites other than mentos-coke
explosions and bad singing.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy YouTube as much as the next person – but I am also a bit
artsy-fartsy, so I like to see artistic stuff being done on the Web too. One such project
is…
Written by Sramana Mitra
I have written a few pieces already addressing the disjointed nature of the web,
whereby, you go one place for content, another for community, and a third for commerce,
the most notable of these is the popular, 4C:
Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula.
Let’s quickly recap the terminology:
3C = Content, Commerce…
Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb
and edited by Richard MacManus
Bill Gates of Microsoft just
announced a deal with Jan Rain, VeriSign and Sxip to develop integration between Microsoft CardSpace
and the open source project, OpenID. This is an
interesting deal between the software giant in Redmond and a popular open source project,
which…
–
The Mozilla Manifesto; rather generic new manifesto. It reminds us of an old Jeff
Bezos quote… when someone asked him ‘What do u think about Google’s moto – don’t be
evil?’ Bezos is said to have replied: ‘I assumed this was obvious’. We couldn’t track
down the exact quote, so please leave a comment if you have a link!
– Offline
Zimbra with…
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. In this post Alex tests out
and explores the emergent world of Yahoo! Pipes. He sees some interesting parallels with
Relational Databases in the 90’s, concluding that with pipes, the Web essentially becomes
a giant database that can be queried and remixed in any number of ways.
One of the…
Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet has
done an excellent
analysis of Microsoft’s Windows Live brand. Her conclusions are quite damning of
Microsoft’s marketing department:
“Problem No. 1: Live isn’t a consistently applied term: Sometimes it refers to
services (like Windows Live Messenger), sometimes to desktop applications (a k a Windows
Live Search…
The oddly-named 1dawg is the latest of hundreds of
hopefuls to ride the online video wave. 1dawg’s differentiating factor is that it
provides a free video conversion service to a variety of mobile devices. It’s a seemingly
minor thing to do, but in the current era mobile devices often use incompatible media
formats – and so this really does scratch…
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus
There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it’s easy to lose track
of them all. So let’s take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the
major players. Our thanks to Ali Dagli of Savvian, for
providing us a lot of the useful data listed here.
In…
This week’s poll relates to a somewhat controversial NY
Times article over the weekend, which suggested that Silicon Valley is more
likely to create innovative and successful tech products than elsewhere in the
world. Obviously Silicon Valley has a lot going for it – it’s a hub for smart
Web technologists, it’s swimming in VC money right now, the…
Later
today Mozilla is launching an upgrade to its Add-Ons website. Add-ons are extensions to the Firefox
browser and Mozilla is aiming to make them more accessible to mainstream users with this
upgrade. Last week I spoke with Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s Director of Ecosystem Development and “add-ons
guru”, about the new add-ons upgrade and also…
– Microsoft
Announces Three New Windows Live Products for Mobile Devices; along with the official
release of Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft has announced 3 new Live products – Live Search
for Windows Mobile, Live Search for Java, and Windows Live for Windows Mobile (a
portal-type offering for mobile including e-mail, instant messaging, search and…
An interesting tidbit came
out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend).
Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine
of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about
how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because
you’ll be able to use…
Latvia is a small country in Northern
Europe, next to Estonia, Lithuania, Russia and Belarus. It has a population of 2.3
million, around 38% of whom have Internet access. The ethnicity of the population
(Latvians 60%; Russian 30%) is reflected in the small internet market, because most local
web sites and apps have 2 versions – Latvian and Russian…
We’ve just noticed that Google has introduced a bit of Ajax into its main property
Search, by way of integrating Maps on some searches. This feature has been around since
December 2006, but the blogosphere’s response was surprisingly low. Given it marks
the first time Google has used Ajax in its main property, we think this small addition
means a…
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
Top Web News
All of the big Web companies were in the news this week, but probably the one that
made the most impact (as usual) was Apple. Steve Jobs is the master of getting attention,
and his call for record companies to abolish DRM
was no exception. It turned out that not many…
Written by Sramana Mitra. Note: this
is an excerpt from a report
written by Sramana Mitra, an entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon
Valley.
Worried your kid is spending too much time in front of the computer? Blame it on
websites like CartoonNetwork.com, Disney.go.com, ArchieComics.com and NickJr.com, which are attracting kids with a…
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
My wife and I were in the bookstore the other day and we were discussing the
difference between shopping online versus shopping in the real world. We were not focused
on ability to easily compare prices or instantly get to different stores, which makes
online shopping superior. Instead, we…
TVTonic is billing itself as “The Internet Channel”.
There are plenty of companies muscling into that market currently (the Amazon/TiVO
partnership being the latest example), but TVTonic seems more focused on being a
subscription service for video podcasts. Essentially they are trying to become a TV
station for user-generated or ‘amateur’ content…
